quote:Which the editorial board of Investors Business Daily obviously is, as they allowed this to be printed on their pages.

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

Perhaps they don't have access to the Internets at Investors Business Daily, because even Wikipedia will tell you that Hawking is British, lives in Britain, and has lived to the age of 67 there, and was diagnosed with ALS under, and treated by the National Health Service for his entire adult life. They must have just been fooled by his voice synthesizer's American accent.

Re: But why can't the BBC correctly pronounce the "a" at the end of names?

Minnemooseus writes:

I'm not sure which is worse, Barack Obamer or the Dali Lamer.

I wonder how they pronounce "Sidney Poitier"?

The British may be different, but my father's speech had many of the characteristics of the full blown Boston Brahmin accent. He definitely said "Dali Lamer," as well as "Rusher," "Aisher" and "Chiner," and would have said "Barack Obamer," too. We had endless fun with his accent, often trying to work words into the conversation that morphed into words with different meanings when he spoke them. But he definitely pronounced "Sidney Poitier" correctly.

quote:A South African IT company has proved it is faster to transmit data via a carrier pigeon than to send it using the country's leading internet service provider.

Internet speed and connectivity in Africa's largest economy are poor because of a bandwidth shortage. It is also expensive.

Local news agency SAPA reported the 11-month-old pigeon, Winston, took one hour and eight minutes to fly the 80km from Unlimited IT's offices near Pietermaritzburg to the coastal city of Durban with a data card s strapped to his leg.

Including downloading, the transfer took two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds - the time it took for only four percent of the data to be transferred using a line from Telkom, the country's leading internet service provider.

A missing piece of data is how much data was being transferred. I've had plenty of downloads take longer than an hour. It is a great stunt though, gotta give them 10 points for style. They should call their new ISP "Winston's Web".